The Stories: Five Years of Original Fiction on Tor.com

by Various

  “There are police here,” he said to me. “They’ve got recorded video testimony.”

  Suddenly I knew why Eten was late getting home. I laughed, because what else was I going to do? He’d gotten us. He well and truly had. Killing him hadn’t done a damn thing. I’d choked his life out of him for no reason.

  Maybe he’d bargained for immunity for us both, but I hadn’t asked.

  I hadn’t asked. I just acted, because I’m stupid that way.

  I ripped that wristband off and threw it. The syndicate was dead. Eten was dead. I was dead, but I owed him something.

  —“This,” Molly said.

  “Yeah,” she answered.—

  We had spent fifteen years together. Almost every day, I saw his face when I woke up and when I went to sleep. We ate from the same table. We shared the same bed. We did each other’s most important scars. I knew every inch of him, and he of me. Fifteen years is a long time when it’s half your whole life. I used my own hands to end that.

  Maybe he’d arranged immunity. Maybe that was his deal, and he was afraid to tell me. Maybe I killed our future, or maybe he was planning on taking us both out, together. You understand, I’m fair game—not just to the police, but to any syndicate with a grudge against good old dead Dawnslight. There’s no running away. They catch you when you run, they do. There’s only running as far as you need to, and finishing your business. I’m old enough. I did enough. I made the choice, and rolled those dice, and there’s nothing else.

  That’s just how stories like mine end.

  Molly finished a last swirl and peeled it up, away.

  “Are you sure?” she asked as she set aside the tools.

  “Positive,” Jada murmured.

  Molly picked up the steel tray and put it on the edge of the sink. She ran the taps cool, rinsing the scalpel of its gory coating and the tweezers as well. The water ran pink down the drain. She’d forgotten her gloves; her fingernails were caked with blood. She frowned, scrubbing at them. The weight of her tablet dragged at her skirt like a stone.

  “I need to take this out to the incinerator,” she said, gesturing to the tray. “Do you mind?”

  “No,” Jada said. She lifted her arm above her head, turning it to and fro.

  Molly pushed the door open with her elbow, holding the tray away from her body. She walked under the minimal shadow of the side of the building, through dry and cakey dirt that came up in clouds under her shoes. Half-dead scrub bushes were barely managing to grow at the back of the building by the incinerator, more branch than leaf, brown and crisped. Molly dumped the contents of the tray into the mouth of the machine—the whole town used it, but it was located behind the clinic for medical convenience—and closed its lid. She punched the button with a quivering finger and closed her eyes, listening to the whoosh of the core heating.

  Her red-crusted fingernails drew her accusatory gaze when she slipped her tablet into her hand. She pulled up the wanted ad. It was one of those impossible decisions you just have to make, because not making it is the same as making it, Jada had said. There was a link at the bottom to the police hotline. She tapped it and put the tablet in whisper-mode, lifting it to her ear.

  “May I help you?” a cool voice on the other end asked.

  “I have this woman in my clinic,” she murmured. “The one from the ad.”

  “Excellent,” he said, no warmer. “Our patrol is nearby. Stall her for twenty minutes, ma’am, if you can safely do so.”

  “The money,” she hissed. “I’ll tell her to run for the hills if you don’t promise me they’ll give me the money the moment—”

  “Yes, of course,” he said. “They will be authorized to transfer funds upon their successful operation. If you do your part.”

  “Thank you,” Molly gasped and shut the link.

  Her breath stuck in her throat. She put a hand to her mouth, pressing hard enough to cut her lips on her teeth in a burst of pain, as if she could physically hold in a scream. Fifteen thousand, instead of three; fifteen thousand could buy so much more than the gene therapy. Fifteen thousand could buy air conditioning, could buy clothes, could buy food. Fifteen thousand was a life.

  She wanted to laugh at herself—of course it was a life. Jada’s, specifically.

  Molly’s heart hammered against her ribs as she walked around the side of the building. What if Jada had heard her somehow, had picked up her bag and left already? The door would have made a sound, she was sure, but—it hadn’t been so long ago that Jada had pressed fingers to her vulnerable spine in threat, real or fake. There were uglier possibilities than her leaving without a good-bye, if she had heard.

  Twenty minutes, Molly thought wildly as she came inside with the empty tray. Jada was sitting on the table, dabbing sealant on her wounds with a wad of gauze. She flicked her eyes up, cataloguing Molly in a way that made her cold to her toes—a sharp focus, predatory—then looked back down at her arm.

  “You did a good job,” she said.

  “For a doctor,” Molly replied.

  Her voice was steady. She had assumed it would come out as tight as her throat felt, or raw like it was full of barbs. Jada was right, though; the lines made a macabre but beautiful painting on her skin, red and white, a canvas of flesh. She briefly regretted not fitting Eten’s name in somewhere, but perhaps that would have been too obvious.

  “My name isn’t Molly,” she said into the budding silence, refusing to let it settle.

  Jada put aside the gauze pad. “I assumed.”

  “You gave me a story,” she said.

  “You want to give me one, too?” Jada asked.

  Molly pulled the chair out from her desk and yanked it across the floor with a screech of wood on tile. She thumped it in front of the examination table and sat, hands in her lap.

  “You don’t have to listen,” she said, looking at the dried blood again. “You could leave. You’ve finished your—business, your responsibility.”

  I’m giving you a chance, she thought desperately.

  “Tell me,” Jada said, her posture sagging into a slump. She cradled the wounded arm over her lap, and neither woman moved to bandage it. The cuts told a tale, of and between them.

  Molly reached up, tentative, and put her hand on Jada’s. Her fingers were still red with her sunburn, peeling finally. She didn’t pull away. Molly tilted her head back and their eyes met, locking, as their hands did also. She wet her dry lips with the tip of her tongue, tasting the sharp tang of the wounds she’d made with her teeth.

  “Molly isn’t short for anything,” she said. “I picked it out of a book.”

  “I was from the E-6 station,” she said.

  My name was Sharad Rathore, and I was a doctor. I had money but not enough money to pay for the school I’d been through, and my father had lost his job.

  I was a good daughter. Doctors have access to all kinds of things—especially in a big hospital where it’s always busy, where people fail to fill out necessary paperwork all the time, and where the security checks are very lax. So, I thought I would sell. Just a little. Enough to make ends meet.

  —“Oh, that was—” Jada began.

  “Stupid, I know,” Molly said.—

  I didn’t know that the syndicates did not appreciate freelancing. It messed with their business, threw off their sales. I was too cheap and too accessible. I realize they could have just killed me, but instead, they set me up. That last meeting I had wasn’t with a buyer. It was a police officer, and the judge they sent me to was syndicate-owned. I went to the court and watched them decide what was going to happen to me without saying a word, shaking in my shoes. The courtroom turned me into a little girl again. But they said they were being very lenient, and it was to be exile instead of prison.

  Lenient, to give the worst possible punishment. Lenient. That was when I knew that I’d been set up—

  The door burst inward, wood slats shattered and skittering across the floor with the force of the kick. Jada wrenched her hand
free and dove for her bag, spilling the contents on the floor; Molly kicked her chair backward and lifted her hands in the air. As the police poured inside—four of them, menacing in identical black body armor and faceplates, shouting over one another—Jada pressed her back to the exam table and lifted a compact pistol from the clothes and tech scattered across the tile. She bared her teeth and stood, the gun sweeping toward Molly. Blood spattered from her wounded arm where it hung useless at her side.

  Molly’s heart stopped at the sight of the gun, her gaze meeting Jada’s through a hot blur of tears. She opened her mouth to say anything—I’m sorry, I love you, you told me to do this—but the barrel moved past her completely and the roar of shots filled the tiny space. Molly screamed, hands flying to her ears. Her defensive curl obscured her vision for a span of seconds and so she missed Jada’s fall until she hit the floor at her feet.

  Blood poured out of her like a river of red ore, viscous and hot. It spread in runnels between Molly’s feet. She pressed her hands to her mouth again, helpless, a high sound escaping between her fingers.

  I’m old, Jada had said. That’s just how stories like mine end, Jada had said.

  Molly took a shaking step back, and another, until she hit the wall. The blood followed her, grasping, and she rose up on her toes to get away.

  “Ma’am,” one of the officers said. She half heard him through the ringing in her ears. “Are you all right?”

  She tore her eyes from the blood only to see the terrible stillness of Jada’s flower-carved arm with its pale white fingers unfurled like petals. Old-fashioned bullets had torn into her torso, shredding cloth and flesh alike, a ruin of meat. Her face was strangely untouched, eyes open, lips parted as if to take breath.

  “We apologize for firing in the closed space,” he said. “We have authorization to confirm your payment. Do you have your account information?”

  Molly fumbled her tablet from her skirt and handed it to him. He tapped the screen several times, held his wristband to it for a flash of infrared, and handed it back.

  “Thank you for your services,” he said. “We’ll handle the cleanup free of charge.”

  “Yes,” she said numbly. “Yes, of course. Fifteen thousand?”

  “Yes, ma’am,” he said.

  The other officers were gathering Jada’s body between them onto a foldable stretcher. Molly’s knees knocked together and she nearly fell, a wave of vertigo smashing through her. Jada, vital and truthful and so fucking beautiful, was now a cold and crumpled thing, carved out of her and left on the floor. The officers hefted the stretcher between them. The same hand that had palmed burning-hot trails over Molly’s hip, her ribs, her stomach, lolled boneless in the air. The officers left as if assuming she would follow. Instead she collapsed into her chair and put her hands on the examination table, still warm. So was the sticky pool of rapidly darkening, drying blood under her feet.

  “Fifteen thousand,” Molly said aloud.

  It had happened faster than she’d anticipated. Her balance hadn’t returned; there was shock in its place, where the memory of Jada’s lips twisted in a final snarl had burned into her. She stood, jerky as if she were a puppet on strings, and went to the sink. She rinsed the scalpel again, and the tweezers, and the pan. She plucked a disinfectant wipe from the box and ran it over the utensils, then dropped them onto the exam table with a rattle. Making the decision—rolling the dice—hadn’t broken her. What that said about her, she wasn’t sure she wanted to know.

  Molly who was not named Molly ran the wipe over her own forearm, cleaning the prickles of sweat from her skin. She took the scalpel in her free hand and traced a line that felt at first like nothing more than cold before it blossomed into a sharp hurt. There was a tale to tell, and a badge she had earned with murder.

  “Her name was Jada,” she whispered to the empty room as she began her own work with her own canvas. “I don’t know if this is the proper way to do it, but this was her story. I think she wanted me to kill her.”

  Copyright (C) 2012 by Brit Mandelo

  Art copyright (C) 2012 by Rick Berry

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  Contents

  Title Page

  Copyright Notice

  Begin Reading

  There was a game we used to play when we were kids—the hanging game, we called it. I don’t know where it started, but I talked to a girl down in Lawford once, and she remembered playing it with jump ropes when she was about eleven, so I guess we weren’t the only ones. Maybe Travers learned it from Dad, and from father to father, forever on up. I don’t know. We couldn’t use jump ropes, though, not those of us whose fathers worked the logging camps, climbing hundred-foot cedar spars and hooking in with the highrigging rope just so to see that bright flash of urine as they pissed on the men below.

  For us the hanging game was a sacred thing, the most sacred thing we knew save for one other, which I’ll have to tell you about too, and that was the bears.

  What you need to know was that north of Lawford where we lived—Travers and I, Momma, Dad sometimes, when he wasn’t at the camps—that was a country of blue mountains and spruce and cedar so tall they seemed to hold up the sky, what the old men called Hangjaw’s country. They said the bears were his, and the hanging game was his. We all had to play, cheating death, cheating Hangjaw but paying him off at the same time in whatever way we could. Living that close to death made you kind of crazy. Take Dad, for instance. Dad’s kind of crazy was the bears.

  I remember one summer he killed nine of them, which was still two short of old Sullivan, the skidder man, but enough of a show of guts, of tweaking Hangjaw’s beard, to keep him drinking through the winter following. He’d caught the first one the traditional way, see, but he didn’t clean it how he was supposed to. He just left it out on the hill and when the next one came he shot it clean through the eye with his Remington Model Seven. He took another seven throughout the week, just sitting there on the porch with a case of beer, just waiting for when the next one came sniffing along, then down it went until the whole place smelled thick with blood and bear piss, and Dad decided it was enough.

  But we were kids and we couldn’t shoot bears, so for us it was the hanging game. That was the kind of crazy we got into. Bears and hanging.

  The first time I played it I was just a skinny kid of twelve with her summer freckles coming in. I remember I was worried about having my first period. Momma had started dropping hints, started trying to lay out some of the biology of how it all worked, but the words were so mysterious I couldn’t tell what she was saying was going to happen to me. It scared the bejesus out of me, truth to tell.

  That was when Travers took me to play the hanging game.

  He was fifteen, copper headed like me, just getting his proper grown-up legs under him. He brought a spool of highrigging rope he’d scavenged from the shed, and we went down to the hollow, my hand in his, a stretch of rope with thirteen coils hanging like a live thing in his other hand. It had to be highrigging rope, he told me, not jump rope like I guess they used in Lawford. Highrigging rope for the logger kids for whom the strength of rope was the difference between life and death.

  Travers stood me up on the three-legged stool that was kept for that very purpose. I remember the wind tugging around at the edges of my skirt, me worried he might see something I didn’t want him to see, so I kept my fist tight around the hemline, tugging it down. But Travers, he was my brother and he wasn’t looking. He tos
sed the end of the rope over the lowest hanging branch, easy, and then he fitted the cord around my neck.

  “Close your eyes, Skye,” he said. “That’s a good girl.”

  There were rules for the hanging game. This is what they were. It had to be highrigging rope, like I said, and you had to steal it. Also it had to be an ash tree. Also you had to do it willingly. No one could force you to play the hanging game. It couldn’t be a dare or a bluff or a tease, or else it wouldn’t work.

  I remember the rope rubbing rough against my neck. It was a sort of chafing feeling, odd, like wearing a badly knit scarf, but it didn’t hurt, not at first. I let go of my dress, but by then the breeze had stilled anyway. My eyes were closed tight, because that was how you played the hanging game, we all knew that. We all knew the rules. No one had to teach them to us.

  “Take my hand now, okay, Skye?”

  Then Travers’s hand was in mine, and it was as rough and calloused as the rope was. It felt good to hold his hand, but different than on the way over. Then he had been my brother. Now he was Priest.

  “I’ve got you, Skye, I’ve got you. Now you know what to do, right?”

  I nodded, tried to, but the rope pulled taut against my throat. Suddenly I was frightened, I didn’t want to be there. I tried to speak, but the words got stuck. I remember trying to cough, not being able to, the desperation of trying to do something as basic as coughing and failing.

  “Shh,” murmured Travers. “It’s okay, it’s okay. Don’t be afraid. You can’t be afraid now, understand? Be a brave girl with me, Skye, a brave girl.”

  I squeezed my eyes shut. Calmed myself. Let a breath go whistling out through my lips.